Office of Public Relations
Missouri Baptist University
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For Immediate Release
RE: Saving Grace: Three Honduran students reflect on the road that led them here
Saving Grace: Three Honduran students reflect on the road that led them here
April 13, 2006
Marvin Soto will never forget his childhood.
From his earliest memories, Marvin remembers his grandmother feverishly selling peanuts from a street corner in the poverty-stricken city of Tegucigalpa, Honduras to make ends meet for him and his siblings.
Sixty-eight percent of Honduran families are deemed poor. A total of 384,832 Honduran children and adolescents, between ages five and eighteen work.
*source: UNICEF
Peanuts, however, weren’t enough.
The stranglehold of poverty in Honduras, a country in Central America where forty-four percent of its residents live on less than $2 a day, proved to be suffocating for Marvin’s family. By the mere age of six, Marvin found himself begging for scraps of food and pleading with complete strangers for spare change on the same streets where his grandmother peddled peanuts.
Over the next four years, Marvin, then a skinny, dark-haired boy with big brown eyes, bounced back and forth from crowded orphanages to the cold streets, never staying in one place for more than a few weeks. He remembers fear. He remembers hunger. He remembers loneliness.
That was then. On a snowy day in Saint Louis this past January, Marvin, now a 20-year-old freshman at MBU and a member of the University’s varsity soccer team, was juggling all of the norms associated with college life: a full slate of classes and plenty of studying while, of course, making time for an occasional snowball fight on the University’s quad.
The road that led him from the streets in Honduras to the classrooms at MBU is nothing less than miraculous.
A young Marvin Soto has a heart-to-heart with Micah Project Director Michael Miller on the streets of Tegucigalpa in November of 1993. Marvin is now a freshman at MBU.
In 2000, twelve seemingly forgotten Honduran boys were chosen as the pioneering class of the Micah House, a division of the Micah Project—a Christian non-profit organization in Tegucigalpa that provides a home to young men who have suffered anguished childhoods on the streets. Since, the Micah House has harbored dozens more. The organization teaches boys to become Christian leaders through discipleship, formal education, and opportunities to serve others who are in need.
After graduating from high school with above-average grades and unmatched hard-learned life lessons, three of those boys are now pursuing what was once seemingly impossible: an undergraduate degree at MBU.
After his parents abandoned him early in his childhood, MBU freshman Christino Hernandez, a native of the north coast of Honduras, too found himself on and off the dangerous streets of Honduras. The Micah Project was able to fill a void that Christino believed was permanent, he said.
“They showed me love,” said Christino, an 18-year-old computer science major who has dreams of returning to Honduras after graduation to open a computer lab for impoverished kids. “For the first time in my entire life, I found love. That love gave me hope that I had never felt before.”
Love was something Christino was desperate to find.
“The street kids showed me how to ask for food, how to use drugs, and even how to steal,” recalled Christino. “But now I have such wonderful opportunities that I want to take advantage of. I found hope for a better future when I entered the Micah Project.”
Christino Hernandez, now a freshman at MBU, entered an orphanage in Tegucigalpa when he was 12 years old, after escaping from another orphanage in a rural area. He is originally from the north coast of Honduras.
After St. Louis native Michael Miller felt called to help the alarming number of street kids in Honduras, he founded the Micah Project in an effort to restore faith in children who have none. At the Micah Home, boys, many for the first time, are able to live like boys. They have daily responsibilities. They learn. They play. They’re nurtured.
“When I think about Marvin, Tino and Olvin at Missouri Baptist, I am filled with pride. This pride is not based in what our project has done for these guys. Rather, it is the fact that each of them has had the courage to keep moving forward with their lives, to keep accepting new challenges,” said Miller. “You'd think that people who have dealt with as much as our guys have would have a pretty bitter attitude towards life. These resilient young men, on the other hand, have been able to hold on to hope even when life has done its best to rob them of it.”
A safe, nurturing home was exactly what Olvin Funez was looking for. Olvin, a native of one of the most violent neighborhoods in Tegucigalpa, left the dire restraints of his hometown in the hopes for a better life.
“I never thought I would have an opportunity like that,” said Olvin, who rarely is able to visit his family because the gangs his neighborhood forcibly recruit teenage boys. “They were compassionate to us. They didn’t just tell us how horrible everything was. They helped me get better.”
Like Christino and Olvin, Marvin’s life today at MBU is a stark difference from his grim beginnings when his grandmother sold peanuts to help support her family. Today, hope has replaced fear. Food has replaced hunger. And, thanks to a Christian organization dedicated to improving the lives of young Hondurans, love has replaced loneliness.
“Yeah, I have a family,” Marvin said, his unaffected face suddenly transformed with an illuminating smile. “The Micah Project is my family. A huge family.”
St. Louis, Mo. native Michael Miller founded the Micah Project in 2000. Following is an excerpt of an interview with Miller about Christino, Olvin, and Marvin’s journey to Missouri Baptist University. Miller currently lives in the Micah House in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, caring for eighteen Honduran boys.
Q: How monumental of an achievement is attending a Christian, liberal arts university in America for Christino, Olvin and Marvin?
A: The fact that Marvin, Olvin and Tino can attend Missouri Baptist is nothing short of a miracle. Young men in Honduras who grow up in their kind of situation--in extreme poverty and from broken families--end up in gangs, in jail, or on the streets. Even if they are able to achieve some sort of stability, they spend most of their lives working just to put food on the table.
Since moving into the Micah Project six years ago, Marvin, Olvin and Tino began to set new goals for their lives. For the first time in their lives, they were able to dream about a future.
Even Hondurans from stable families often do not get past the sixth grade because they must leave school to help support the family. And, for those few who do get to attend the national university of Honduras, they find a crumbling institution that can barely educate the students that attend. It takes an average of 11 years for a student to graduate from the Honduran national university.
Most Hondurans dream of being able to attend a university in the States, but the harsh fact is that poor Hondurans are not able to get visas to do so.
Attending Missouri Baptist will set these guys apart and create opportunities for them once they graduate that they would not otherwise have. Truly, it will help them to become the future Christian leaders of this country.
Q: How is the Micah Project funded?
A: Are supporters are covering the large majority of costs for these young men to be able to come to MBU. Most of our supporters are in two cities: St. Louis and Houston. Folks from St. Louis, especially from the Central Presbyterian Church and Greentree Community Church, have supported this project since 1999, when it was just a dream.
Most orphanages and institutions take in as many children as they can. Because of these, they are able to provide the bare minimum of services: a bed, three square meals, maybe a little education. The Micah Project tries to do a deep work in a few number of beneficiaries--deep rather than broad.
Over our six years, we have worked with 21 young men who have come from desperate situations. Of those twenty, nine are now in college! This would not be possible if our supporters did not understand our mission. They allow us to dream big with a few numbers of young men and help them do big things in their lives.
Q: What does this mean for you to watch children be transformed by the Micah Project?
A: To me, watching God transform these guys' lives is grace in action. God reached down to all of us while we were in the darkness of sin; he placed us on the mountaintop of his salvation even when we deserved nothing more than death.
In the same way, our guys lived mired in misery before finding the Micah Project. Most suffered abuse, violence, neglect and a brutal life on the streets. When this is all that a child knows, this is what a child internalizes; they feel that they deserve no better than the misery that they inherited at such a young age. That makes it even more of a miracle then, to see where God has taken them. That they were removed from that kind of situation and molded into purpose-filled men of God teaches us that nobody is beyond His loving reach.
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Missouri Baptist University is a premier Christian university in Saint Louis, offering graduate and undergraduate studies in over thirty specialized fields and nine degrees. MBU's education and fine arts programs are nationally known in addition to business, religion, administration of justice, and more. MBU is one of the fastest growing higher education institutions in Missouri with an enrollment of over 4,500 students at five locations in the bi-state region — West County, Lincoln County, Jefferson County, Franklin County and the new Illinois extension at Lewis and Clark Community College.
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